Key SEO Questions Answered

What is SEO?

A definition: “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine‘s “natural” or un-paid (“organic“) search results.” (Wikipedia)

In plain English, SEO or search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website’s ranking on search engines’ ‘free’ or ‘natural’ listing for target phrases. Put simply, the higher the ranking for those phrases, generally the more people will be able to find you.

The search engines have free/natural/organic listings and paid for listings or adverts. SEO focuses on the natural listings.

There are variations such as international SEO and local SEO, but the reality is whatever the SEO the aim is to improve search engine rankings.

A little about search engines
When you are thinking about SEO, it is best to think about your customers and potential customers. This will help you to develop relevant content and this is what search engines prefer too. The search engines are continually trying to provide results for their visitors that meet their needs. If someone types into Google “Email marketing services Nottingham’, Google wants to provide the searcher with the most relevant results so that they satisfy the searchers needs. By doing this, Google ensures that searchers continue to use Google over other search engines.

What does this mean for you as a business?
There is no point trying to fool Google or any other search engine for that matter. Focus your efforts on achieving good rankings for the things that you do and the things that you do well. When it comes down to it – relevant, interesting and authoritative content (that can be seen by the search engines) is what customers, prospects and search engines want – and hopefully you do too.

The process of improving your ranking on search engines natural listing can be a long journey and in almost all circumstances requires patience. However, with the right strategy and consistent, continuous effort your rankings will improve.

What is involved in the search engine optimisation process?

Keeping it really simple, you will need to look at this as a three stage, on-going process:

1. Write content that is relevant, that includes the words and phrases used by customers and potential customers who search for your product or service
2. Build links to your pages – and not just your home page – to show that your pages are important
3. Go back to 1 – keep going!

Of course there is much more to the SEO process and more detail will be come in future blog posts.